One is increasingly forced to confront the psychotraumatic fact that most of the world loathes and fears rationalism and science, fervently clings to paranoid cults and Jew-hatred, and would delight in the destruction of the open society. People who aren't moved to form mobs or death squads and who aren't inflamed by ethnic or sectarian demagogues are under an evermore lethal threat from people who do these things.
Take the example, mentioned in the previous posting, of the Polish engineer slaughtered in Pakistan by the Taliban. There can be but one response: the verminous rabble that beheaded him should be hunted and exterminated without compunction. And if any rise to replenish the ranks of jihad they too should suffer relentless pursuit and destruction. The message should be unmistakable: we have no objection to making war on beheaders and amputators, oppressors of women, and ethno-religious supremacists.
The time should have long ago ended when the enemies of the Enlightenment could count on the US and its allies to behave squeamishly and allow themselves to be subjected to squalid victimology and moral blackmail by Islamic fascist imams and mullahs and their fellow-traveling associates in the anti-war movement. It should also be clarified that the argument that killing jihadists only creates more of them can be inverted; the jihadists should know that their attacks have the potential to create waves of resistance, recalcitrance, and retribution. After the Gaza war Hamas declared victory despite their utter devastation, yet the Israeli electorate has proven just as obdurate and steadfast. Parties of the Israeli right (those determined to eliminate Hamas rather than tolerate its continued existence) have come out of today's election stronger.
It is essential to note that this civilizational struggle is about the ideology of the combatants, not the tactics used to fight it. For example, the pathetic outcry about Guantanamo Bay represents a disastrous miscontstrual of the terms of the war. I believe the prison camp there should be closed for the same reason President Obama evidently gave to a meeting of the families of victims of 9/11 and the attack on USS Cole: it had become associated in world memory with the horror show at Abu Ghraib and it was being used for the recruitment of jihadists. This is is a shrewd assessment of public opinion, corrupt and hypocritical though it is.
But the reality of Guantanamo Bay is rarely discussed because a loud, insufferable mentality prevails, which insists America has betrayed its core values and shown itself to be no better than the terrorists. It is rarely mentioned only three people have been waterboarded. One of them, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was the mastermind of the 9/11 calamity and the man who sawed American journalist Daniel Pearl's head off on web video after forcing him to admit to the crime of being a Jew. Further, Guantanamo Bay is probably more sanitary and safe than any maximum-security prison in the Muslim world, monitors from human rights NGOs are there constantly, and prisoners are allowed their religious practices. It should also be noted the legal framework governing the treatment of non-state, non-uniformed, wartime enemy combatants was unclear when al-Qaeda terrorists commandeered planeloads full of civilians and smashed them into buildings full of civilians.
As I said, this war is about ideology. The combatants' systems of thought should be evaluated to determine which is more ethical and defensible. I claim that the people who prate about Guantanamo Bay do so in order to postpone, evade, or parse the larger issue. By and large they prefer not to deal with serious, complicated questions that at some point might demand criticism of another culture (gasp!). It is to succumb to cultural relativism to idly denounce US policy on Guantanamo Bay when an epochal war over the very notion of human rights is afoot.
All the energy and time that were devoted to campaigning against Guantanamo Bay should have been spent exposing and excoriating gender apartheid in the Muslim world, public floggings and hangings, the disenfranchisement of women, the criminalization of adultery, the censorship of the press, the banning of political parties, the stealing of elections, the looting of public coffers, the endemic corruption, the promotion of suicide-murder and jihad, the intimidation and murder of apostates, freethinkers, and polytheists, primordial delusions about human sexuality, the incitement to genocide against Jews, the demonization of America, mass illiteracy, and religious extremism and bigotry.
Until the public dialectic shifts its crippling focus from the tactics of the war to the content of it, we cannot expect any lucid critique of this world-historical contest.
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